Mrs Miniver and the Plateaknits
Friendsocks © Giles Babbidge Photography.
I currently have an exhibition on at Prick Your Finger which is a brilliant and quirky yarn and haberdashery shop in Bethnal Green in London.
I’m showing both the Mrs Miniver series of socks which talk about relationships between people, and also the final pieces from the #plateaknit performance in January.
Setting up the Plateaknits © Giles Babbidge Photography
I went up to London last Wednesday to put the show up with lots of help from Giles who was also kind enough to document it all for me. Rachael and Louise and their shop staff were lovely and made us very welcome with cups of tea throughout the day and put on a great private view in the evening.
Mrs Miniver and the Plateaknits © Giles Babbidge Photography
I will be posting over the coming weeks to give a little more insight about some of the Mrs Miniver socks and the #plateaknit project, so look out for those blog posts.
The exhibition is on for the rest of April, so if you are in London, please do visit and let me know what you think.
PS My lovely chap, Giles took all of the photographs for me. Please do visit his site here.
PlateaKnit!
I’ve just announced the latest @platea project (our sixth) over on their blog: excitingly it is to be PlateaKnit! Well, there had to be a knitting performance sooner or later, didn’t there? It is going to run 25th – 29th January 2010 (Monday to Friday), just on Twitter. I’m really excited to be leading a @platea project and I do hope that lots of you want to will join in.
The full instructions of how to participate are over on the @platea blog, but I’ll give you the gist of what is happening here. If you think you’d like to join in, please let us know in the comments section of the @platea blog post, and be sure to follow the other performers taking part as well.
I will be making something whilst dipping in and out of the instructions throughout next week. It may be a hat: it may be a scarf. After the performance is over I will be making up a larger item ( probably a scarf) following the full set of instructions. I’ll post what I come up with here along with links to what others come up with.
If you’d like to participate yourself, just drop your name and Twitter ID into the comments at the bottom of the @platea post, follow the other performers, and get instructing or making!
The Dive: @Platea Project IV
The Dive: 1 by Ingrid Murnane
For the next few days I’m taking part in The Dive, @platea’s latest project. Here’s what @platea director, An Xiao has to say about it:
As the summer comes to an end in the northern hemisphere and the fall art season heats up, the steering committee and I thought it might be fun to have one last hurrah with a public dive through social media. The performance will be September 8 to 10, and we’re asking our performers to use the real-time news feed as a visual performance space for diving.
Just think about it: you go online, you check your Facebook and FriendFeed feeds, and as the day goes on, each status update and picture post slowly makes its way down. If it’s a busy day and you have a lot of friends, these updates slide down quickly. If it’s a slow day, they get there eventually. Imagine a picture of yourself diving through this space, gradually making your way down your friends’ news feeds.
Sounds kinda fun, huh?
I think so! Are you taking part too?
Find out more about it on the @platea blog where there is a list of performers, and follow @platea on Twitter and join the Facebook or Ravelry groups to watch the performance take shape.
a week of knitting in public
I knit on the train most days. I really enjoy the extra layer of rhythm that the clicking of the needles adds to the jolting of the train on the tracks. Sometimes people might comment or ask what I’m doing; mostly they have a quick look and get on with their thing. In short, I’m used to knitting in public; but this week public knitting was taken to a whole new level for me.
As previously mentioned, I took part in a university library outreach programme in Winchester this past week. The Knitting Reference Library held an exhibition in a small gallery space, ‘Cornershop’ which had once been a pet shop. Set up like a living room,’The Knitting Room’ had plenty of places to sit and look at patterns from the library or read knitting books. An exhibition of knitted objects from the handling collection were suspended from fishing line in the large bay window and duplicate vintage patterns displayed in the windows. I was invigilating for a good part of the week, and knitted in public like never before (and knitted over half a cardigan). I think that some people thought that we were an art installation, and certainly it felt like that at times! We taught plenty of people, young and old to knit. On the second weekend, 13th and 14th June, it was World Wide Knit in Public Days and all week we were very much encouraging people to come in and have a go. Lots did.
Throughout the week the library staff and I taught people to knit from scratch, how to make pompoms and helped knitters to learn new techniques. I think we had about 10 brand new knitters in total and 6 pompom-makers! It was great to have a selection of knitting books on hand which supplemented my own knowledge. I tend to teach knitting by showing the person how by ‘doing’ in the first instance, but needed a reference for things like cabling.
It was a really fun week and the exhibition worked on many levels. Many more people know about and will be using the Knitting Reference Library now, there was a coming together of existing knitters and the beginnings of new knitters. Two artists came in and made a sound recording of the gathering, which will lead on to further work as well. The Knitting Room became a focus for discussion and debate on the culture, heritage and process of knitting for the week. I’m hoping for this discussion to continue on in a range of media too.
From a personal point of view, I particularly enjoyed the interaction with other artists and knitters: bouncing ideas around, learning new techniques and planning new artwork. I got an awful lot out of the experience of teaching. Although I teach people to knit on a fairly regular basis, I’d not taught children to knit before: well, no under 10s anyway. I’ll be reflecting on how it all went and what I’ve learned from it in a separate blog post later in the week.
I’d love to hear from you if you came to the Knitting Room last week. What did you think of it?
Also, go and visit Cornershop if you are in Winchester to see Winchester School of Art’s Textile Art 3rd year student Bethany Mitchell‘s You and Whose Army? which she will be installing this coming week.
n.b. All photographs © Ingrid Murnane and used with the permission of those photographed, or their parents.
Hopes/dreams/fears
hopes/dreams/fears
@Platea are launching Project iii: hopes/dreams/fears. This time it is not a performance in the way that Co-Modify was, more of a public participatory art project. There isn’t the sustained performance aspect this time, cos we know you’re busy people! You can take part once, or many times. It’s entirely up to you.
An Xiao and the @Platea steering committee will be collecting people’s hopes, dreams and fears in the form of status updates. We’ll be doing it in real life at gatherings of people (from festivals to dinner parties) and also online in forum groups, like in the Ravelry @Platea group. The status updates will appear during July on a special facebook page, so you can see the hopes, dreams and fears of people all round the world.
It would be interesting to find out your hopes/dreams/fears, as a group of textile art blog readers. If you’d like to take part, all you have to do to is:
1. Fill out the form here (you can do this anonymously or using a pseudonym if you would prefer).
2. Join the hopes/dreams/fears Facebook group.
3. Wait to see yours and others’ hopes, dreams and fears broadcast over the next month and a half in your Facebook feed.
‘IngridNation hopes that you might like to participate.’
“hopes/dreams/fears” begins in New York City on June 12 during the FIGMENT NYC arts festival on Governor’s Island and it runs till the end of July with participants across the world. Members of online public art collective @Platea are gathering individuals’ hopes, dreams and fears in the form of status update language (i.e., “Jessica hopes that she graduates with honors next year.” “Fred fears he might lose his job due to the recession”). These will then be broadcast to a broader audience via a Facebook page, with the goal of uniting diverse groups via social media and offering a collective picture of communities’ hopes, dreams and fears during this time of economic crisis and transition.
There’s lots more about @Platea if you visit http://plateastweets.blogspot.com
Co-Modify: the story so far…
I’ve been taking part in the @platea performance Co-Modify this week and it has been really interesting. I’m being ‘sponsored’ by Sirdar, the British knitting company. This has been my profile picture on Twitter, Facebook and Ravelry this week.
I said that I'd be wearing a hat made from Sirdar yarn: I never said anything about it being knitted...
I’ve not taken part in an online art project before and it has been so interesting to take part but also to have been documenting it. I think that I have got much more out of it this way. I’m going to blog about the experience properly in a couple of days to explain what I have been doing across my social media networks; indeed, to reflect on what I have learned from it too. I wanted to just give a quick update of what has been going on first though.
So, enough gabbing on: here is the blog post that I wrote for @platea today, which gives some of my favourite parts of the project so far.
@platea Online Art Performance: Join Us!
I am on the steering committee of an exciting new project by @platea called ‘Co-Modify’. It is an online art performance which will be happenening next week (3rd-9th May), and it would be brilliant if you’d join us!
Go to the @platea website here to sign up, then join the Facebook group or follow @platea or me on Twitter for more information.
Here are the full details:
@PLATEA TO PERFORM “CO-MODIFY” MAY 3-9
Online Public Art Collective to Enact Fictional Sponsorships on Social
Media Networks
Online public art collective @Platea will be performing “Co-Modify”, a
commentary on and exploration of the commodification of social media.
From May 3 through 9, a number of performers will be enacting a
fictional sponsorship by a company of their choosing and embedding
that company’s brand into their daily social media activities. Via a
collective online performance focused on Twitter and Facebook
accounts, @Platea performers will be enacting a world where everything
we do online has monetization value and a world where, more and more,
embedded and targeted advertising has become part and parcel with our
daily lives.
“In marketing, there’s this notion of finding that segment of one,
i.e., catering to the individual, rather than broad groups. It’s more
of a theoretical ideal, like the horizon or the perfect circle,”
writes An Xiao, director and founder of @Platea.
“And yet, embedded, contextual advertising is bringing us closer to that reality. All the
data about ourselves that we upload to Facebook and blogs, everything
we type about ourselves in Gmail, the little quips and jokes and
flirtations and family photos and comments between friends–all these
little lifestreams can be aggregated into a picture of who we are and,
importantly, what we might spend money on.”
In the open-source and open-information culture of Web 2.0,
“Co-Modify” will be a statusing (online happening), a free-form public
art performance that anyone is welcome to join. It will span multiple
social media streams, including but not limited to Twitter and
Facebook. I, for example, will be
‘sponsored’ by Sirdar, the British knitting company:
“My Facebook, Ravelry and Twitter profile pictures for the week will show me wearing a hat made from some of their yarn. Every now and then, I’ll post a status update: perhaps
‘Ingrid is working on a hat design using Sirdar Denim Chunky.’
Not every post, of course, will be sponsored, but, as with
celebrity endorsements, my sponsored actions will be embedded
seamlessly with my regular activities.”
@Platea is a collective of individuals interested in the power of
public art carried out in the digital megacity of social media. Their
most recent project, “The Great Yawn”, was a Twitter-based flash mob
of some 100 individuals, including contemporary artists Rachel Perry
Welty, Matt Held, Joanie San Chirico, Nina Meledandri and others. On
March 31 at 1:15 pm EST, @Platea members tweeted a collective yawn,
from Los Angeles to New York to London to Tasmania, to explore the
mundane and monumental elements of Twitter. The event attracted the
attention of a number of art world blogs, including Bad at Sports,
Hrag Vartanian, and New Curator.
@Platea was founded by artist An Xiao, a photographer and digital
media artist exploring issues in contemporary social media. Her
Twitter-based art projects have been featured with the Brooklyn
Museum, the Guardian UK, ArtNews and NYFA Current. Its steering
committee is comprised of members in two continents, including
British-based textile artist Ingrid Murnane.
@Platea can be found online at
http://plateastweets.blogspot.com.
